


rules for dating my Time Lord daughter

by coffeesuperhero



Series: Family Pond 'verse [9]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-15
Updated: 2011-12-15
Packaged: 2017-10-27 10:29:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/294794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeesuperhero/pseuds/coffeesuperhero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p><b>Disclaimers</b>:  This isn't for profit, just for fun. All characters & situations belong to Russell T. Davies, Stephen Moffat, BBC, and their various subsidiaries.<br/><b>A/N</b>: Spoilers for everything current, just in case.</p>
    </blockquote>





	rules for dating my Time Lord daughter

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimers** : This isn't for profit, just for fun. All characters & situations belong to Russell T. Davies, Stephen Moffat, BBC, and their various subsidiaries.  
>  **A/N** : Spoilers for everything current, just in case.

The TARDIS feels dreadfully empty without someone else, the specific someone else being his daughter, who has abandoned him to pursue an education, as though centuries of flying around time and space wasn't education enough.

Everyone always leaves, in the end. When it's the humans, he can understand. They get older, they want their feet on the ground to live out their sequential, ordered lives, and it's always horribly sad when they say, "I want to go home," but they're human and they're homesick and they don't live forever and so it's comprehensible, it's to be expected.

Who doesn't want to go home, every now and again?

He can't, though, ever, not even for a moment, so he puts it out of his conscious thoughts, or at least, he pushes it all the way to the very edge of them. It never really goes away, but he can layer it over with running and adventuring and that seems to help the sting of it. Just a bit.

He's halfway through plugging in the coordinates for the birth of the first star in the Horsehead Nebula when he realises he's been talking to himself about how beautiful it will be, expecting his daughter to interrupt with questions or corrections or suggestions or _something_ , but of course she won't. She's not here.

He wonders where a version of River is who will know enough to understand all of this.

"The Bone Meadows," he mumbles, flipping back through memories of his wife. "She said she was excavating some something or other in the Bone Meadows, but _when_?"

He has to land on the site five times before he hits it right. He's fairly certain that the TARDIS ignores his coordinates the last time and just flies them to the appropriate time, but he's pretending that he's done it on his own.

One of River's students is working on a dig close by, speculating as to how the people had lived there, a thousand years before.

"Oh, that's wrong," he says, interrupting the students' theorizing. They look at him with no small measure of disgust. "Well, it _is_. I just saw it five minutes ago."

"I'll thank you to stop deviling my students," River says, and he whirls around to face her. "Hello, sweetie."

"Hello," he says, and before he can talk himself out of it, he flings his arms around her. The curls of her hair tickle his nose.

"I take it she's gone, then," River says, and he pulls back, shaking a finger at her.

"You knew!"

River merely spreads her hands and shrugs her shoulders, as if to say, "I _am_ her mother."

"But she's barely even one hundred," he laments.

"She's one hundred and seven, and what, you thought it would be the three of us and the universe forever?"

"And the TARDIS," he amends.

"Doctor, you really can't just ignore what we already know about--"

"I can, I am, that _never happened_ ," he interrupts. There are Things About Which They Do Not Speak, and their daughter's potential future-- he swears it's still just a potential future, since, after all, it hasn't happened for her yet, and time, precious, beautiful, infinite time, can be rewritten-- is at the top of the list. He regrets having gone to Asgard, and he really doesn't want to know the entire story of the art planet. They haven't been back to Nighthawks since, or Las Vegas. How dreadful.

River is giving him a Look. "Doctor."

"River," he says, and she rolls her eyes.

"Once upon a time, my love, you wanted a life of your own, too," she reminds him.

"That was completely different," he protests. "And she should be more careful, shouldn't she, running around the universe with a new face, and _you know whose fault that is_."

"I know whose fault you think it is," River says testily. "We have no idea why she had to regenerate, you know, and really, I think you're one to talk."

"Every time that's happened it's been both unavoidable and extremely necessary," he says snippily.

"It's enough for me to know that she _can_."

"That was never a question," he says dismissively. "And it's all far, far in the future. _Very_ far in a future that probably won't even happen at all."

"Fine, fine," she acquiesces, holding up her hands. "I'm not interested in having that argument again; it's dreadfully dull."

He scratches the side of his face. "I don't suppose you'd be up for a visit to, say, California? In 2011?"

"I thought you'd never ask, sweetie," she says.

\+ + + +

They pick a boring Thursday in 2011, a few months after Brook has started school. River knocks on the door, and Brook's voice yells for them to sonic it open, already, which the Doctor happily does.

Brook is sitting in an armchair by the window, a bundle of electrical cords draped around her neck. She waves at them with her sonic.

"Sorry you had to let yourself in," Brook says, still tinkering with wires. "Bit tied up at the moment."

The Doctor points at the wiring hanging around her neck and grins. "Ha!"

"In medias project, then, my love?" River asks, looking over the electronics strewn haphazardly here and there.

"Yes, just, hang on, almost...aha!" Brook sonics the tv on and beams over at them. "Forty-fourth century comedy was the best. I _knew_ this would be useful."

"Hmm. Also useful if you want to, say, eavesdrop on interstellar communications," River points out, leaning against the wall, a knowing look on her face.

"Will-it-do-that-really," Brook says, all in a rush, adjusting her glasses with a shifty expression on her face.

"I suppose it would," the Doctor replies, "but only if you had a nanowave converter, which--" He follows River's eyes. "Oh. Yes. Looks exactly like that."

They both turn to stare at their daughter, awaiting an explanation.

"Well, look at the time," Brook says brightly, glancing at her watch. "Have class, must be off, perhaps you could just come back in an hour for you, a year or more for me?"

"Young lady," they say together, and she groans.

"Fine, yes, okay, I'm eavesdropping, but I'm eavesdropping for a reason," she tells them. She picks up a magazine from a side table and tosses it at her father, who catches it and flips it open. "Why d'you think I picked this particular university at this particular time? All of space and time, anywhere I wanted, why Cal Berkeley in 2011?"

"Give us a mo'," the Doctor says testily to River, who is tugging the magazine from his hands.

"This kind of technology is much too advanced for this period of human history," River says, looking over at her daughter.

"Unless you happen to be, say, not human and not from this period of time," Brook says. She stands up carefully, extricating herself from the wiring draped around her neck, and taps her foot on the ground, impatient.

The Doctor stares at the magazine. "It's a drilling operation. They're mining the Earth, but for what? Wait, wait, _of course_ , they're--"

"Extracting rare metals from the Earth's core," Brook interrupts. "Well, they said 'extracting,' I said, 'haphazardly mucking about with the plate tectonics of a category five planet.' We agreed to disagree."

"They'll kill millions of people," the Doctor shouts, already halfway out the door. "River, are you coming?"

"I thought I'd let our daughter finish, sweetie," she calls, exchanging a look of fond irritation with her daughter.

"But--"

Brook holds up her hand. "Relax, I've got it covered."

"Did you disable the drill?" The Doctor stares at her.

"Noooo, but I had a lovely chat with the ringleader about doing that very thing, and I told them that if they didn't cease and desist their operations immediately, I'd bring in the big guns."

"Brook," the Doctor says, a disapproving frown on his face.

River, however, shrugs and says, "Seems reasonable to me."

"You can't enforce peace at gunpoint, you just can't _do_ that," the Doctor says, gripping both his daughter's shoulders.

"Father dear," Brook sighs, patting his arm, "you taught me the rules, do try and remember them."

He frowns at her. "What?"

"She lied," River says. "Obviously."

"You're not going to shoot them?"

"Of course not, what would be the point? They'd just send in a team to investigate and then I'd have to keep shooting them, and I have other things to do of a day than dispatch people and dispose of bodies," Brook says, and then, upon seeing the look on her father's face, hastens to amend, "Oh, and it would have been wrong. Probably should have mentioned that first, eh."

"You might have done," the Doctor frowns. "What did you do?"

"I learned from the best, you know. The only weapon I really needed was here," she says, tapping her sonic against the side of her head. "Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to keep them from turning the Earth into an uninhabitable volcanic wasteland, I have plans later. On this planet."

"Carry on," the Doctor says, waving a hand. She waits a moment, expecting them to leave, and when it is apparent that her father is not budging, she sighs and carries on fiddling with wiring for another minute or so, until the television is suddenly filled with the image of a crew of aliens, obviously still merrily mining the Earth's core, threats or no.

"Ah, hello, there," she says, waving. The nearest alien shifts about to look at her. "Still drilling away, I see, violating approximately twenty-two intergalactic laws in the process. A shame, really; I did warn you."

"You can't stop us," the alien tells her. "You are one silly human; we are an army."

"That's as well as may be, but I've already stopped you," she says, and points her sonic at the screen.

"This means war," the alien grumbles.

"War!" Brook says, eyes dancing. "What's it good for?"

"It is good for our empire," the alien says proudly.

"Sorry, the answer I was looking for was, 'Absolutely nothing,'" Brook chirps, staring at her sonic for a moment before looking back at the screen. "I suppose if you're not from this planet I can't really expect you to know anything about its pop culture or really anything at all about the billions of people living here, except, of course, that there _are_ billions of people living here."

"Humans are worthless. This world will be well rid of them."

She raises an eyebrow at the screen. "I'm sorry that you feel that way. But not, I suspect, half as sorry as you're going to be. Did you get all that?" she asks, and suddenly the frame on the screen divides, showing them all not only the aliens at their drilling operation, but also the interior of a well-lit spaceship. In the captain's chair sits another alien, the same species as the others.

"Transmission received," says the captain, in a somewhat grumpy-sounding voice. "We'll take it from here. Our apologies."

"Best of luck," she says cheerfully, and turns off the screen. She rubs her hands together. "Well. That's my good deed for the year, I think."

The Doctor looks from the blank screen to his daughter. "What did you just do?"

"Exactly what I said I would," she says simply, shrugging. "I brought in bigger guns: his parents. Seems they're not too keen on violations of the Shadow Proclamation. _Someone_ will not be getting a planet for Christmas."

"Oh, _well done_ ," River says, as the Doctor gives her a round of applause.

"Fewer gun references, next time, if poss," he cautions, and mother and daughter roll their eyes.

"I'll see what I can do," Brook laughs. She shuffles some things off of her couch and waves at it, gesturing for them to sit if they want.

"Well? When are we?" she asks. "What have you been up to?"

"Oh, this and that," says the Doctor, making a shooing motion with one hand.

"You _cheated_ ," Brook says immediately. "Of course you cheated. It's been a month for me, what did you do, pop over to collect Mum and then straight here?"

"Er," he hedges, shuffling from one foot to the other.

"Unbelievable," Brook says. "Well. Unbelievable only in the sense that it is completely, totally, absolutely believable, so, the opposite of what I said, really."

"Ignore him," River advises, and the Doctor makes an affronted noise. "Tell me what you've been up to."

The Doctor wanders around the room while Brook complains about twenty-first century academics and how terribly silly it is that they won't let her take all forty-four hours of academic courses she wants to take next semester.

"It wasn't any better at Luna," River tells her. "I had to use my hallucinogenic lipstick just to get into two extra seminars."

"What do they expect us to do with all this spare time?" Brook asks, throwing her hands up.

"Save the world, apparently," the Doctor says. "If you're bored, you can always come back with us in the TARDIS. Lots to see! There's an intergalactic carnival on Pluto in the fifty-sixth that we haven't been to yet."

"She's already said she has plans later on this planet, sweetie," River reminds him.

"River, it is a _time machine_ ," he says, and they both reply, " _I know_."

"It's a first date, Dad. Can't be late for _that_." Brook says.

"What do you mean, a date?" The Doctor sputters. "You can't be dating, you were a little girl five minutes ago! And humans, you can't, you're not, you shouldn't date humans, it'll end badly."

"There's more to be done with us than just dating us," River points out, grinning wickedly at him. Brook's face shifts between amused and oh-god-my-parents.

"None of that either!" the Doctor shouts, hands over his ears.

Brook rolls her eyes. "Oh, brilliant, so my options are 'Celibacy, or ...'"?

"Bugger that for a game of soldiers," River says, and then with a thoughtful expression adds, "which is, by the way, a fun game."

"Stop giving her ideas!"

"Darling, she has ideas of her own, I'm certain," River tells him. She turns back to her daughter. "That being said, if anyone breaks either of your hearts they will have me to answer to."

Brook shakes her head. "She's a nice girl and it's just coffee, but thank you."

"Just coffee," the Doctor grumbles. He waves his hand at Brook. "But does she _know_?"

"Know what?" Brooks asks, wrinkling her nose. "That my parents couldn't help me on move-in day because they were probably off saving some future civilization from invading aliens, which I, technically, also am?"

"Something like that," he says, frowning. "And we would have helped you move in. It's a time machine."

"Oh, yes, Dad, that's the first thing I tell everyone I fancy. 'Hi, I'm a time-traveling alien, how d'you feel about cross-species dating?' You can't imagine the calls I get," she says, but then River laughs and shakes her head, and Brook grins over at her. "Then again, maybe you can."

The Doctor waves his hand. "What is that supposed to mean?"

Brook takes a breath. "Queen Elizabeth-Madame-du-Pompadour-Marilyn Monroe-everyone-at-grandma-and-grandpa's-wedding. Shall I continue?"

"I could make a few additions to that list," River grins.

"I hate both of you," he says.

"You really don't," they reply.  



End file.
